Tutorial Writing and story resources

This is good for naming places.



I'll brainstorm which of these are most applicable to Lizardmen and Seraphon later, but all of these could be applicable for naming conventions of the First.

 

Ohhh... interesting tips

 

There are no rules in writing. There are guidelines. You can violate guidelines when want, but you shouldn't do it randomly, you violate guidelines when you have a valid reason or justification.

Anyway back to place names.

Important Landmarks

First Idea, He talks about how Tolkien repeats place name words a lot. Towers and fortresses are usually prefaced by Minas. Minas Tirth, Minas Morgal. My favorite Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine taught me one Cardassian word I will not forget, "Nor" refers to a base. Because Terok Nor and Empok Nor were two settings that were very important.

I don't know if any one feature should feature repeatedly for Lizardmen or not. In official GW canon, Lizardmen like to have Blank of Blank. Nearly every temple city is the City of the Blank. We also things like, the Pool of Tepok, Monumental of Izzatal and the Jungle of Mists. Pretty standard for the fantasy genre. That's not quite the same as a recurring feature, but we could come up with wholecloth or repurpose a suffix or prefix in Saurian to attach to all Lizardmen Temple cities. Maybe a separate one for Kahoun and settlements and fortifications OR in term of titles all non-Temple city places Lizardmen are given the same suffix or prefix to demonstrate how important temple cities are.

Temples are almost certainly the most important landmark to the lizardmen culturally. Water bodies are probably the distant second. Giants maps are probably not going to have too many water bodies labeled on them, but regional maps would be dotted in blue.

"How do I find the new hunting camp?"
"Head out towards Sunset Swamp then turn due east, if you hit Grey River, you went too far."

I'm sure the Lizardmen named every large mountain but they are probably not going to use the features of the land to define an area, they will focus on the water features (or the lack of water for a desert) first and foremost.

Outside of Lustria, I think Lizardmen are likely to label places as Land of the Blank, where Blank refers to whatever inferior creature lives there. It is probably very rare that they bother to subdivide names based on features within these foreign lands.


Cultural Names

It would probably be pretty rare for Lizardmen to use other race's names for places. It would probably be pretty rare for outsiders to use Lizardmen names. Within my own fluff with the Great Debate dividing Slann, if a Lizardmen faction is very enthusiastically endorsing Merastar's interpretation (which calls for greater cooperation between Prodigals and Lizardmen), there would be more effort put towards cultural exchange, but this would be a very recent and uphill struggle.

In Age of Sigmar, there is probably going to be slightly more Seraphon and non-Seraphon using place names from the other group but still not a lot. If you see warmbloods using Seraphon names, the Seraphon probably beamed down from the stars and saved their butts at least once in the past. Rather than humans using Saurian names, it's likely they would adopt an event based place name to honor the Seraphon. Going back to King's Landing example from Game of Thrones, the local humans might call a place Dragon's Landing if the Seraphon saved the region in the past.

Literal Versus Flowery Names.

An case can be made saying that Lizardmen would favor simple literal names or flowery poetic names. For interesting and realistic storytelling, we probably want to use both. If a location is mainly important for Slann and Skink priests, a location is likely to have a flowery name. If a location is primarily used by the common Lizardman, it probably has a simplistic literal name. That's just my two cents.


Scalenex tries to apply this to Klodorex.

I hadn't actually saw this video before writing the description of my fluff temple city. I do have a lot of Temples of Blank and Pools of Blank. And of the course the whole concept is based on the Monument of Izzatal which is mentioned in passing in the 8th edition army book but never expounded on.

Now I did say that Lizardmen would put more cultural value on water bodies than mountains, but this city is built around the base of a mountain witha legendary monument on top so that guideline goes out the window.

So the Monumental of Izzatal is at the very top, and four temples are built in the mountain side perfectly Northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. These temples are ringed by guardhouses, fortifications, and supply depots and the whole area is tightly run by the Temple Guard, even when the Slann are absent. I probably need to come up with a place name for the fortification section and a term for th four temples better than "the mountain temples."

Okay so back many years ago when I wrote sci-fi pieces, my favorite alien race came from the planet Klodorex so I made many Temple city called my Temple City Klodorex. I already established the precedent on my alien planet that proper nouns end in "ex" much like how English uses capital letters to show something is a proper noun, so in a way Scalenex is sort of like turning scalen into Scalen. I have resisted the urge to push the suffix "ex" into Saurian. Anyway, I retconned that the kahoun of Klodorex is called Klodorex because the mountain is called Mount Klodor, so the name Klodorex loosely translates into "Around Klodor." I have not figured out what Klodor means. If it's literal, perhaps Klodor means "ley line intersection." or something similar. It can also mean "opening," "doorway" or "path" because Mount Klodor overlooks a mountain pass in the Spine of Sotek Mountain Range. This pass is one of the easiest ways to traverse mountain range East to West.


Okay, so my city has five districts. I so far called the North District, West District, Central District, East District, South District. yawn. This needs improvement!



Okay, the Central District contains all the major temples and all the spawning pools. So it's often called the Temple District, but "Central District" actually fits because everything that is central to Lizardmen society is here. Maybe some poetic Skink priests call it the Little Mountain because the temples are laid out in the same fashion as the temples at the top of Mount Klodor.

So far I have the Temple District surrounded by "the wall." Boring. Perhaps I should call it Tehauin's Wall because the Wall was first built during the Clan Pestilens War.

The five temples are the Great Temple, Temple of Tzunki, Temple of Quetzl, Temple of Itzl, and the Temple of Tlazotl. That's fine, it would be sacrilgious to call the temples anything too weird. Klodorex does have two large Itzl temples so this temple would often be called Old Itzl Temple and the other one the New Itzl Temple. A slightly crass way to the refer to the temples would be the Slann Itzl Temple and the Skink Itzl Temple because the beast handlers tend to greatly prefer touse the newer Itzl temple which is actually much closer to the beast stables.

Since nearly every Temple City probably has a "Great Temple" the Great Temple would sometimes be called the Temple of Izzatal because it mirrors the location of the Monument of Izzatal. Some very conservative old guard Skink priests might think it's sacriligious to name a Temple after a Slann and not an Old One. These fuddyduddies would call the Great Temple Naitzaklodorex. It's the first temple of Klodorex.

Besides the temples, the most noteworthy building in the Central District is the main armory. Because the Temple Guard essential run the armory and because this is where the Temple Guard actually guard temples, the armory has the colloquial nickname "The Skull Helmet" because it's what the Temple Guard use to protect themselves.



The East District, until recently was dominated by beast stables. For centuries, the vast majority of the Stegadons, Cold Ones, Terradons, Razordons, Carnosaurs, Bastiladons, and Salamanders were all penned in the east district. Thus the district was nicknamed the Beast Handler's District or sometime Itzl's District.

Since Kaitar briefly took over the administration of Klodorex, the various creatures were all put in separate districts to prevent accidents where one dinosaur provokes another into lashing out but old habits die hard so the East District is still called the Beast Handler's District or Itzl's District. The main temple of Itzl hasn't been moved. Given time the district is likely to get a new nickname.

Most of the buidlings here are very practical so they are unlikely to have cool nicknames though I could call the Terradon base/Temple of Tlanxla as "the Aviary" but I'm not 100% sure Terradons would use aviaries.

The Eastern district also has a coliseum like structure with raised seating for large events called the Gathering Place. I don't see a reason to ditch the literal name I gave it.

The Western District might be nicknamed the Young District because until a recent construction boom, their wasn't much there. The Western district has an artifical reservoir that has the nickname Tzunki's Bladder (but don't let a Skink priest hear you using such a flippantly disrepectful name!). I don't see a reason to change or add any place names here.

I don't see any reason to change or add or any names to thinks in the Northern District though I might add the nickname Worker's District because that's what people mainly do there. I could call it the swamp district because the district borders marshland.


I don't see any reason to change or add any names to the Southern District. I'm not sure what nickname it would have besides the Southern district .

Eh, I'm running out of steam on naming conventions for my own stuff......